Some minor issues

It seems Geert finished his movie

I like it: touché

Indeed, in my mind advertising is about listening to your consumers, offer the opportunities and basically understand them. Something classical advertising seems to forget often these days.
Good idea, perfect execution.

thx PTR

De laatste tijd wel wat job hopping gaande in de Vlaamse interactieve media scene. Geen scopes, aantal iets oudere, maar toch een lijstje, temeer omdat het allemaal mensen zijn die ik persoonlijk ken (op Rutger na, da’s al redelijk lang geleden dat we nog iets samen gedaan hebben).

SBS investeert in talent. Na Bart Becks in A’dam, krijgen we in België
- Krijn Jonckheere, die zijn stoeltje als Interactivity Manager bij de VMMa ruilt voor eentje als Manager SBS Digital, bij SBS dus
- Bart Stassen gaat mee, voorheen multimedia designer bij Paratel (dochter van VMMa) en nu Digital Media Producer bij SBS

Eerder wisten we ook al dat
- Clo Willaerts Skynet (MarCom manager) inruilde voor Sanoma Magazines waar ze gaat werken als Internet Strategist

Vers van de pers, maar al langer geweten in de wandelgangen.
- Patricia Boydens verlaat i-merge om zelfstandig consulente te worden. Een van haar eerste klanten is Rabobank.
- Rutger Beckers verlaat de VRT waar hij als adviseur nieuwe media werkte, en gaat aan de slag bij One Agency als Account Director & Head of Cross Media.

Voor de rest is er precies nog iets aan het broeden bij i-merge.

In today’s BizReport: “Gmail users are younger, richer than Yahoo“.

They claim this to be a fact e-marketeers should take note of.

Should they?
On the one hand targeting gmail “might” result in higher conversions (depending on the parameters of course, what do you want to sell, what does it cost, ..). On the other hand: is there a reason to exclude older and less fortunate users? Don’t they have value?

2 things:
- Since I assume every self respecting e-marketeer uses the opt-in principle for his/her campaigns, demographics based on email address is of minor importance. You should know the things you need, if age and income are important for you this is data you should try to collect elsewhere.
- I love optimization, but keep asking myself how far this should go. We might end up with a model only for-sure-conversions are targeted. In this case prospects will lose their value, and in my mind they should be part of every brand expansion strategy.

But interesting demographics indeed.
Hope those spammers won’t take note

If I were Google, I definitely would go for feedburner.

Face it, it’s a perfect match.
- It’s all about data
- It’s largely used
- It’s best on the market
- There is a business model behind
- It works very well
- It’s an innovating company (they add new features all the time)
- It’s a perfect addition for AdSense
- It’s a perfect addition for Google Analytics

Concerning this latter: I just want my stats to be integrated (easily, without tweaking). I have a good amount of readers on my RSS feed (according to feedburner) and a growing number of visitors on my blog as well. There is an overlap, I just don’t know the scale. I don’t know who’s clicking through, and I can’t guess why.

So Google, I heard you guys had some cash left. Just go for it (and pay me finders fee )

Added value, indeed.

Next: Technorati.

I don’t get this. E-commerce is like 10/15 years old, and still “professional” websites are making basic mistakes.
Like this example below, on the Sherpa website. Sherpa is an organization selling tickets to shows and events, and luckily they understand internet is an important sales channel.

However, I’m very stunned when I see things like this:

Apparently I can’t order more than 1 ticket of the main category (the one with the most tickets available) at the same time. For starters this is absurd. It just can’t be I have to order 2 tickets separately (and go 2 times trough the process, pay 2 times postage, get 2 seats not next to each other, ..). This is a real show stopper and business killer. But secondly: what a sucky way to communicate errors. For those not understanding Dutch: the error message is not well formed and not very user friendly. Not explained why, not explained what you should do to order more, ..

Really, I don’t get this. This is supposed to be core business. I suggest a drastic usability review. I think I remember the registration process wasn’t very smooth either.

So back to the title: How is e-commerce supposed to grow up? This is a bottom-line question. I don’t know what the Sherpa site have cost. Being in the business myself I have sort of an idea, and I guarantee you: it’s not cheap. It shouldn’t be cheap though. But I can’t understand, why in an expensive website, user experience and usability isn’t well thought and used as a presumption in development.

Last week I attended the Microsoft Mix07 conference in Las Vegas. It was on the kind invitation of Microsoft. Meaning I was able to go for a very discounted price (we had to pay about 1/3th).

Mix was overwhelming. It was in the mythical city Las Vegas, in an A-class hotel (the Venetian). Everything was big and looking good.
Ray Ozzie’s keynote was very energetic and inspiring. The sessions where most of the time ok (I’m not gonna report on them, I can’t add value, just use Technorati) and networking went smooth.
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I’m reading this weekend

I was very intrigued when I saw the following headline on clickZ last week: Joost Signs Major Advertisers.
Seems like a good thing right? Joost is great, so extra money might speed things up and improve the service. So the headline sounded great, but then I read the article, and it said they were going to do 30 seconds spot, among others.
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See this picture taken from Technorati.

You’ll notice top listings in searches as well in tags used concerning mix07 and Silverlight.

You can read a summary of Silverlight on Wikipedia, or on Technorati’s WTF.